Between the Two Ponds
One passage. One idea. A few quiet minutes. Short devotional readings for people being formed by grace, written from a small chair beside still water in Falcon, Colorado.
Pull one up. Read slowly. There is no hurry here.
Union and Identity
Two words have been working on me and I cannot get free of them.
"There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus." (Romans 8:1)
Two words carry the whole of the Christian life: union, and identity. Union is where sanctification begins. You come to know Jesus Christ as Lord, the Holy Spirit becomes an intimate part of your life, and you are bound to him. Paul reaches for one phrase again and again across all his letters, well over a hundred times, and the phrase is in Christ. In him. Inside him. Joined. That is the union, and for the believer it is already a settled fact.
Out of the union comes the identity, and this is where most of us stall, because a union can be entirely real while the identity is still old. The wild branch has been grafted in. That happened. It is finished, it is true. But the branch still has to stop trying to fruit like a wild tree. It has to draw from the trunk it is now attached to rather than the roots it used to have. And that shift is not automatic.
This is the quiet struggle underneath most of our frustration with ourselves. We were bound to Christ the day we came to him, and we have been arguing with our own old sap ever since, trying in our strength to be what we already are by grace. So do not labor to earn a union you already possess. Labor instead to believe it, and to let the new trunk, and not the old root, decide what grows.
Led, Not Driven
Not to strain. Not to grit. Not to summon whatever is left of your resolve at the halfway point and force your body up the rest of the hill.
"But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law." (Galatians 5:18)
What does it actually mean to be led? Not to strain. Not to grit. Not to summon the last of your resolve at the halfway point and force yourself up the rest of the climb. Led means something has hold of you and is drawing you forward, and your one task is to stop resisting it. That is the whole assignment: to become responsive rather than reluctant, aware rather than distracted, open rather than braced, obedient rather than forever negotiating. And then to walk into whatever God is calling you into, even when it looks impossible from where you stand.
Be careful here, because this is exactly where people hear grace and reach for their coats, as though being led meant nothing is required. It does not mean that. Peter still had to get into the boat. Abraham still had to leave the country. You will still, at some point today, have to do a thing you do not want to do. Being led is not being carried while you sleep.
But there is all the difference in the world between a man dragging a cart and a man on a horse. Both are moving. Both are tired by the end of the day. Only one is spending his own strength to make the load go, and only one is likely to make it home. The flesh drags the cart. The Spirit gives the horse.
Most of us have tasted only a crumb of what it is to be carried like that, a moment here and there when prayer stopped being a shove and became a being-drawn. Do not settle for the crumb as though it were the whole meal. There is a loaf. Ask for it.
Halfway Up the Hill
When I was about twelve, my best friend Ryan and I were inseparable, and we would ride our bikes all over Jane Lew and out past it.
"Walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh." (Galatians 5:16)
Every rider knows the hill. You are moving along the flat, you see it coming, and you do the only thing there is to do. You pedal hard, build every ounce of speed you can, and throw yourself at it, hoping momentum will carry you up. And it does, for a while. Then the ground steepens, the momentum bleeds out, and you have to change gears and actually climb. For most riders the legs give out about halfway, and the rest of the way is spent off the seat, pushing the bike to the top, breathing hard.
That is most of our praying, if we are honest. We hit it with everything we have, in our own strength, and we run out halfway up, and the rest is a grim shove toward a summit we are no longer sure we will reach. We call it discipline. Often it is only momentum, and momentum always runs out.
But watch the word Paul chooses for life in the Spirit. He does not say driven. He does not say pushed. He says led. Led is a different thing entirely. Driven is force applied from behind, the whip, the will, the last of your own strength. Led is something out ahead of you, drawing you forward, so the power is no longer coming from your spent legs.
This is the difference between a prayer life you generate and a prayer life you receive. One ends halfway up the hill. The other is drawn to the top by Someone stronger than you, who was never depending on your momentum in the first place. So stop trying to power up the hill on your own. Ask to be led up it.
No Third Category
We have to become mindful of what our words are doing to people, because they are doing something, always, whether or not we intended it.
"Death and life are in the power of the tongue." (Proverbs 18:21)
We have to become mindful of what our words are doing to people, because they are doing something, always, whether we intended it or not. We can use words to speak life. We can use words to speak death. There is no third category. There is no neutral. There is only what is happening in another person's chest after you have stopped talking, and you do not control it, and you cannot take it back, and very often you will never even find out.
And here is a question worth not putting down. If Jesus is truly in us, would not our words also speak Jesus out of us? Take it not as a flourish but as a test. If the Spirit of the living God has taken up residence in a person, and if what fills a heart is what finally comes out of the mouth, then the things you say when you are tired, and the things you say when you are angry, and the things you say in a low voice about someone who is not there, are all telling you something true about what is actually in you.
Not what you hope is in you. What is in you. The mouth is the most honest instrument you own. It reports the true contents of the heart, especially when you have stopped guarding it.
Most of us do not always like what our mouth reports. But the answer is not to argue with the report. It is to let it drive us back to the only One who can change what is in the well, so that what comes up out of it is life. Ask him to fill the heart with himself, and then listen this week to what your words reveal is really there.
The Cry Underneath
Paul reaches past Greek and takes an Aramaic word out of a kitchen. Abba does not mean Father. It means Daddy. And notice who is saying it. Not you.
"Because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father." (Galatians 4:6)
We have made the word Father formal. We set it at the front of our prayers, in the voice we use when other people can hear us. It is a good word and a true one, but somewhere along the way we starched it. Paul does not use that word. He reaches past Greek altogether and takes an Aramaic word out of a kitchen. Abba. It is what a small child says. It does not mean Father. It means Daddy.
And notice who is saying it. Not you. Read the verse again. God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father. The cry is not something you generate. It is not a warmth you have to produce on Sunday morning by trying harder or singing louder. The Spirit of the Son is the one crying, and he is doing it inside you, and what he is saying is Daddy. Which means the question was never whether you can feel it. The question is whether you can hear it.
Because something can sit on top of that cry. Something can be loud enough in your chest that the voice underneath does not get through. Not sin, necessarily. Usually it is an idol, and usually it is a good thing that has grown a mouth. It talks constantly. It asks for your hours and your worry and your endless small sacrifices, and it talks straight over the quiet voice saying, Daddy, I love you. You are not being asked to manufacture affection for God. You have been adopted. Your inheritance has been signed over to you. The cry is already in you, and it has been for longer than you know. Sit still somewhere this week, long enough to hear what is saying it.